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Revisiting a Cafe's Society of Brazen Violence

Not long ago, Caffe Giannini in Ridgewood, Queens, was the sort of place where a customer could sit for hours at one of the round marble tables, drinking cappuccino brewed on the antique brass espresso machine. But according to federal agents, the tiny thriving storefront cafe did more than serve good coffee, cannoli and mozzarella sandwiches to its clientele.

It also served, they said, as the clubhouse for an exceptionally violent group of neighborhood toughs who performed a vast array of dirty business for the mob.

Members of the group, the Giannini crew, have already been prosecuted twice through a pair of linked indictments that led to more than two dozen guilty pleas and the closure of Caffe Giannini in 1998. And later this year, 16 more members, including the crew's reputed leader, Baldassare Amato, are scheduled to go on trial under yet a third indictment in Brooklyn.

The crew's exploits were so unusually vicious that a judge once said in court that she had never seen anything like them in all her years on the federal bench. Richard A. Brown, the Queens district attorney, who prosecuted some of the first cases against the gang, said, ''They have never hesitated to use violence to settle a personal score, to extort a small businessman or to commit a robbery,''

In court documents, sworn statements and interviews with investigators, a portrait emerges of a nefarious band of brazen hoodlums attracted to all types of illegalities -- bank robbery, loan-sharking, arson, extortion, drug dealing, gambling and murder. Crew members were sophisticated enough to gauge police response time by calling 911 outside houses they planned to rob, yet barbarous enough for one to shoot a woman in the stomach because she was six months pregnant with his child and refused to have an abortion.

Prosecutors, in court documents, have described the murders of a pair of drug dealers, John Ruisi and Steven Pagnozzi, as perhaps the most brutal of the Giannini crew's crimes. On Jan. 8, 1992, Mr. Ruisi and Mr. Pagnozzi were lured to the Giannini social club, where the crew planned to force them to reveal the location of their enormous stash of marijuana, the documents said. When the men refused to speak, they were each shot in the head.

According to a letter by federal prosecutors contained in the case file, members of the crew stuffed the bodies into plastic garbage bags, loaded them onto Mr. Ruisi's truck, then drove to a street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where one crew member, Anthony Sciacca, drenched the bodies in gasoline and set them on fire. The letter said Mr. Sciacca later told other gang members that Mr. Ruisi, though shot in the temple, had still been alive. ''Ruisi apparently said the gas felt cold when it splashed on his body,'' the letter said.

While the crew frequently worked with the Bonanno crime family, it was largely a freelance operation. ''They were sort of like per diem wise guys,'' said a defense lawyer who once represented a member of the crew. ''A little Colombo. A little Bonanno. The Gambinos needed a leg broken -- they'd do that, too.''

In November 1992, for instance, three members of the crew joined forces with Vito Guzzo, a Colombo family associate, in trying to kill a Colombo soldier, Vincent Ricciardo, according to an indictment. Wearing Halloween masks, the government says, the gunmen cut off Mr. Ricciardo's car on a quiet street in Queens and fired dozens of rounds at him, at point blank range. Remarkably, he survived.

These days, Ridgewood is still predominantly Italian despite a growing Hispanic and Russian population. Televisions in the restaurants and bars on Fresh Pond Road, where the Caffe Giannini sat, are often tuned to the Italian-language cable station, and old men can be seen each morning shuffling into neighborhood coffee joints.

While most members of the Giannini crew were described as would-be wise guys recruited from those cafes and bars, the government said some, like Fabio Bartolotta, 23, came from entrenched mob families. Prosecutors said that his mother, Francesca Bartolotta, and uncle, Paul Ragusa, were members of the crew, and that his father, Salvatore Bartolotta, and great-uncle, Fillipo Ragusa, were linked in the early 1980's to a Bonanno heroin ring, whose downfall formed the basis for the notorious ''Pizza Connection'' drug-trafficking case.

According to investigators, Mrs. Bartolotta owned the building at 66-12 Fresh Pond Road which housed the Caffe Giannini and she served as a sort of den mother for the 20-something mobsters, letting them use her house and finding them lawyers when they were arrested.

Records show that many of the crew's crimes were decidedly small-time. There were, for example, the two members convicted of stealing the Sunday collection plate of a local church from a parishioner in the church parking lot. Or the other accused of owning an illegal pet: a 9-month-old cougar.

And there is also the unfortunate tale of the National Westminster Bank on Myrtle Avenue in Queens, which the authorities say was robbed by the crew three times within 10 months in 1993 and 1994.

Still, the government said the crew had serious roots in organized crime, perhaps best exemplified by Mr. Amato, the balding, bespectacled 48-year-old described as its leader. Mr. Amato got his start in the mob as a bodyguard for Carmine Galante, the former Bonanno family chief, and was sitting just feet from Mr. Galante when masked gunmen killed the aging crime boss at Joe and Mary's Restaurant in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in 1979. Though investigators have long believed that Mr. Amato helped plan the killing, he was never charged. But he went to prison in 1987 on a conviction in the Pizza Connection case.

Described in a transcript of a detention hearing as a ''respected and powerful member of the Bonanno crime family,'' Mr. Amato has been indicted on charges of associating with the Giannini crew ''to make money and, at times, settle personal grievances,'' court documents say. But Paul Bergman, Mr. Amato's lawyer, has said that his client has led a successful and law-abiding life since getting out of prison in 1990 and that he now owns his own company, which does -- all puns aside -- extermination work.

The most serious charge against him in the new indictment is that he ordered the murder of Sebastiano DiFalco, the proprietor of a Ridgewood restaurant down the block from the Caffe Giannini, which Mr. Amato ran from 1990 to 1994. The government said that Mr. DiFalco's body was found stuffed inside the trunk of a stolen BMW on a street in Brooklyn after the two men argued in 1992.

Despite the savage crimes the Giannini crew members have been charged with committing, their lawyers, friends and neighbors have routinely said in court filings that they are remarkably good-natured and responsible young men. In transcripts of F.B.I. wiretaps, they sound extraordinarily average, talking about girls and other friends, though between discussions about pending criminal cases.

''These guys are, by and large, so normal that you'd never think twice about them if you hadn't read about the horrible things they supposedly did,'' said a lawyer for one of the defendants. ''In some ways, they're doing exactly what they were raised to do. That may be bad things, but they are all very well-adjusted. It's actually really strange.''